Frederic Wehrey

Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research deals with armed conflict, security sector governance, and U.S. policy, with a focus on Libya, North Africa, and the Gulf

His essays, reporting, analyses, and opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, TIME, POLITICO, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Small Wars and Insurgencies, the Journal of North African Studies, Mediterranean Politics, the Chicago Journal of International Law, and the Journal of Democracy. He has been interviewed by major media outlets such as NPR, ABC News, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and the BBC. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations and has testified before the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.

He is the author of The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), which the New York Times called “the essential text on the country’s disintegration.” His previous book, Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings (Columbia University Press, 2013), was named a “Best Book on the Middle East” by Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy magazines in 2014 and 2013, respectively.

Before joining Carnegie, Wehrey was a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, leading research projects on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Iranian influence in the Middle East, the strategic impact of the Iraq War, and Saudi-Iranian relations. He also served for twenty-one years in the active and reserve components of the U.S. Air Force, with tours across the Middle East and in North and East Africa.

He holds a doctorate in International Relations from Oxford University and a Master’s in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He studied Arabic at Cairo University, the University of Jordan, and the Yemen Language Center in Sana’a.